A privacy-preserving adaptive pricing and coordination framework for decentralized prosumer energy systems with demand response and EV/V2G-inspired flexibility
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Distributed energy resources (DERs), electric vehicles (EVs), and the involvement of prosumers are turning distribution-level energy systems into decentralized, flexibility-driven markets. However, these systems are hindered by interrelated issues such as stochastic supply–demand mismatch, DR rebound, EV/V2G availability constraints, coordination effects (represented through a coalition proxy), network stress, and privacy-preserving settlement. These components tend to be studied separately in existing research, and their combined operational and settlement-level trade-offs have not been assessed. In this paper, a simulation-grade Adaptive Pricing and Coordination (APC) framework for decentralized prosumer energy trading called Zenergy is presented. The framework combines price-responsive DR with curtailment and shifting/rebound; EV/V2G-inspired flexibility with availability and travel-energy constraint, required departure SOC, willingness, and degradation-cost constraint; locality and matching effect represented by a coalition proxy; simplified network-stress proxies; and ZK-aware settlement overhead modelling. To separate out the contribution of each of these components, a conventional double-auction benchmark, transparent No ZK settlement case, centralized coordination proxy, ablation scenarios, sensitivity analysis, and scalability sweep are provided. Monte Carlo simulation experiments (500 prosumers, 1440 time steps) reveal that DR is the primary factor to improve adequacy (by 11.62% compared to the fixed-tariff case), while EV/storage and coordination proxy boost the adequacy improvement to 12.64%. The no-network case for full APC-ZK achieves a 12.68% reduction, while the case with the network-stress proxy enabled for APC-ZK has a smaller reduction of 2.04% because the proxy activates modeled curtailment. Compared with transparent settlement, the metadata-leakage proxy is reduced by roughly 49.85% with ZK settlement, and latency is increased from 1.8228 s to 2.0921 s, and gas cost from 0.0003 to 0.0006. The results show that Zenergy can be used to assess the trade-offs between the adaptive pricing, DR, EV/V2G flexibility, coalition locality proxy, network-stress proxies and privacy-aware settlement.
Source: Scientific Reports
Language: English
Topic: Smart Grid Energy Management
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,690
OpenAlex ID: W7223344069